I think I tossed out all of my old iPods when the boards died, but I’m gonna have to dig through the bins in the basement to see if there’s anything left: there’s a new project promising a modern, easily swappable motherboard for old iPods with Bluetooth, WiFi, 2TB of space and a 40-hour battery for 3G, 4G and Mini models. I had a 3G model at one point, and did try to swap in a new board for it almost ten years ago. That’s a long time to be hanging on to old broken tech, even for me, but there’s a slim chance it’s still downstairs. I’ll have to go see.

The other option is to have the battery replaced in one of our old iPhones, which is usually about $70, but then there’s the frustrating issue of having it linked to my Apple account and trying to sync with my actual working phone, which messes both of them up.

[scratches beard]

…now that I’m thinking about it, I could just create a new Apple account for it with its own email address so that it’s separate. I’m going to try that. There is something to be said for the simplicity of the original iPods, and I would love to go back to that. I do enjoy my $1 Nano, but that’s limited by 16 GB of storage space. It’s good for holding a driving playlist, but it doesn’t have enough room for a full catalog to match my ever-shifting moods.

In the meantime, I’ve cleaned up and updated our server in the basement, and with my departure from WRI, I’ve been focused on cataloging and storing files not only for work, but my files as well. Cleaning up Dropbox, archiving work files, and backing up photos and videos has been top of mind for the last month. I dropped off the server I was using for WRI files at the office yesterday and set it up for the guys to use. Having a solid week to organize, move, and catalog photo and video files was long overdue and very handy. I’m leaving them with about 25 TB of files organized in a way that they should easily be able to find and access everything I collected in my tenure there. That project complete, I’m turning to my own stuff and making sure that I have everything I need before I leave. Another thing I took advantage of was an electronic recycling day to get rid of four decommissioned laptops that were bouncing around the basement. There’s more to be done down there, but it’s a good start.

Meanwhile, a friend reached out to see if I could help convert a bunch of Pagemaker 7 files to something she might be able to edit. Apparently, the way to do this is to use InDesign 6 to convert the files: anything above that cannot read the files. InDesign 6 came at a weird inflection point in my software history. I was staunchly a cork guy until cork laziness caught up with them and they got left behind when in designs capabilities eclipse theirs. What that meant is that I don’t have any copies of in design CS six only CS 5.5 and then CC two in all of the dozens of backups I’ve made over the years. I think I might have a workaround to get a version of 5.5 running, and I think that will convert the files, but it’s going to take a little time to sort that out. There are other ways to convert page maker files to PDF, and then copy the text out, but I want to see if I can get the files into a clean in design format for my friend first.